The present invention relates to methods and devices for the sending of data in a hearing aid system.
Wireless communication between one hearing aid and another hearing aid as well as with an additional communications interface must fulfill special requirements, which, for example, are caused by the very limited available transmission energy of a transceiver located in the hearing aid as well as by the antennae, which are frequently quite ineffective due to spatial limitations.
The solutions implemented in other application fields resort, on the one hand, to multiple channels or time-slicing procedures. If, on the other hand, a single-channel communication system is used, in the case of sufficient transmitting ranges and transmission bandwidths of all the involved communication participants, it is possible as a rule to ensure that the wireless communication channel is free in the case of the use of a communication procedure. For energy and spatial reasons, these methods, which find application for example in modern digital communication systems (Bluetooth, DECT, etc.), are not suitable for hearing aid applications. The FM communication systems common in the field of hearing aids as a rule represent pure point-to-point communication systems with a communication level for a single application, which continuously transmit analog signals.
In this connection, a hearing aid with several analog inputs and one additional digital input is known from German patent publication DE 195 44 546. It is possible to further process several digital signals fed in at the additional input of the hearing aid by way of a multiplexer and to lead said digital signals to a signal processor of the hearing aid.
By way of this procedure, the spatially separate microphone signals of stereo microphones can be received and further processed quickly and error-free in a digital manner.
Additionally, in the German patent publication DE 102 01 068, a method for communication of a hearing aid with external radio interfaces is described, in which address data and/or channel data regarding several signal sources are stored in a memory device. By way of a priority-driven address management system, the hearing-aid wearer can very comfortably automatically pick up communication with a radio interface of the highest priority.